General questions from a reefer with less than a year's experience

[oneshotreef]

The best advice I could give is form a plan and stick with it.
I prefer skimmer over fuge.
Some run no skimmer.
My sump has no baffles.
I run a filter sock, skimmer, and a carx.
For water level you will need an ato pump and container.
You control your sumps water level with it.
Check out some build threads of tanks you like for more info.

Tank has a 2 gallon ATO chamber. I was looking at the Tunze 3155

 

[oneshotreef]

Tank is coming next week. I think will go with a skimmer and skip the fug. So much to learn with it being my first sump system. I'm looking forward to being able to expand filtration over my AIO I have now.

 

[Rubblereefer]

Having a refugium in the early stages of a tank, in my experience is counterproductive. Later on though, its very nice to have. Why not just add an external cheato reactor? Sounds like that would be the best of both worlds. You can even diy one on the cheap out of a brs reactor.

 

[Subsea]

Tank is coming next week. I think will go with a skimmer and skip the fug. So much to learn with it being my first sump system. I'm looking forward to being able to expand filtration over my AIO I have now.

A pod refugium requires no light. Just fill a void with coral rubble and allow flow thru.

 

[oneshotreef]

I recently decided to upgraded to a new tank and got everything setup and cycling the other day. It’s a waterbox marine x 60.2. 53 gallon overall.

I had a question on cycling. Can you cycle a tank and never have an ammonia spike. I am using brightwell xport and microbacter 7. I seeded the xport for 24 hours per the instructions.
I’m 5 days in and ammonia and nitrite have read 0 every day. Today I tested nitrate and got a reading of .25 on a Hanna checker.

is it possible that the xport being seeded for 24 hours created a proper filtration that is not allowing the ammonia to build any. I would think that since I’m registering nitrate that would be the case.

thanks for the help